Deanimation

Deanimation is depletion, and the diagnostic value of the term is in what it points at. Deanimation indicates an unequal transfer of anima, so wherever it appears something has been taken and not returned. The physical signs Marsh lists are the ordinary language of chronic stress, low stress resistance, weakened immunity, adrenal exhaustion, depression, and she treats them as effects of an energy problem rather than as a cluster of unrelated conditions. Several routes lead to it. Deanimation shortens the life of those with a broken heart or with unrequited anima conduits, and it shortens the lives of those in abusive or draining relationships. Simulated sources make it worse rather than better, since some of them cause the body to release its own anima stores to produce euphoria, which produces severe deanimation and a craving that feeds an addictive cycle. It also operates at group scale. Holding an endogroup together against the outward pressure of exosocial expansion takes constant force, and deanimation alongside cognitive dissonance and general unease are the signs of that force being spent, which is why totalitarianism is exhausting to everyone living under it and produces widespread immobilizing depression. The animus in the definition may belong to a person, a nation or an object, so the same depletion is available to all three.

There is no established term with this scope. Medicine and psychology divide the same territory between allostatic load, the cumulative wear of chronic stress described by Bruce McEwen, burnout as an occupational syndrome and the literature on adverse childhood experiences linking early stress to later disease. Selye's general adaptation syndrome, with its exhaustion phase, is the closest single predecessor. What separates Marsh's term is that all of these describe a cost borne by an individual under load, whereas deanimation describes a transfer, which means it always implies a second party. That is the analytic difference. Burnout asks how much strain a person is under, and deanimation asks where their energy went.